middle class

Bill Morneau, Justin Trudeau left untouched by proposed new tax rules

The proposed new small business tax changes do not impact family trusts or numbered companies, used by Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to shield their family’s vast fortunes.

April 6, 2016

Trudeau’s personal wealth, which was inherited from his father, is held in numbered corporations. And Morneau has money in a family trust and numbered corporations.

The NDP took direct aim at Morneau who argued that the Liberals are going after wealthy people who try to use small-business structures to avoid paying taxes, but would not respond to questions about his family businesses and why the new rules leave out the sheltering of funds for both Trudeau and himself.

April 5, 2016

Morneau is the beneficiary of a number of Canadian companies on one hand, and on the other states “we also want to make sure that we do not have a situation where some people that are, frankly, very well compensated, pay a lower tax rate than others,” said Trudeau. (Source: Global News)

Netflix tax? Trudeau says no to MPs’ proposed broadband internet levy

February 11, 2016

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has flatly rejected a controversial recommendation from a parliamentary committee calling for a five per cent tax on broadband internet services.

The new levy, included in a majority report of the Canadian Heritage committee released Thursday, was intended to boost a media sector struggling to adapt to technological changes and evolving consumer habits.

“We respect the independence of committees and Parliament and the work and the studies they do, but allow me to be clear: We’re not raising taxes on the middle class, we’re lowering them,” he said during an event in Montreal. “We’re not going to be raising taxes on the middle class through an internet broadband tax. That is not an idea we are taking on.”

September 24, 2014

Trudeau said his Liberal government was elected on a promise to lower taxes for the middle class and raise them on the wealthiest one per cent.

The committee’s report suggested the proposal would add hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues to the Canadian Media Fund, which already receives a levy on cable bills to finance the production of Canadian content.

The tax, levied on broadband internet providers, would apply to high-speed internet services that allow for the streaming of music, movies and TV shows, but not to slower and less costly services.

Revenue generated by the current cable levy is no longer seen as sufficient in an age of cord cutting and “over-the-top” services that stream content over the internet.

The Heritage committee has spent more than a year studying the industry, which has been steadily losing advertising revenue and market shares to online giants such as Facebook, Netflix and Google. (Source: CBC News)

The rising price of driving

Gas prices in Ontario will rise about 4.3 cents a litre and residential natural gas bills will go up about $5 a month under the Liberal government’s cap-and-trade plan.

Premier Kathleen Wynne said she expects the program won’t increase electricity costs for the industrial and commercial sectors. She revealed economic impacts Wednesday, a day before her government introduces its budget, which is expected to include more details about carbon pricing.

“The cost of doing nothing is much, much higher than the cost of going forward and reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. (Source: CP)

Meanwhile, Hamilton is in the midst of a $10-million-plus installation of cameras on the Red Hill Valley Parkway and at hundreds of major city street intersections in order to allow better signal and traffic control in emergencies.

But it turns out those cameras can track speeding cars, too.

Not enough to send you a ticket — the city deliberately chose an image resolution for the cameras that is supposed to be too low to allow eyeballing of your face, licence plate or curtainless bedroom window.

But the cameras are capable of tracking vehicle speed and speeding trends over time, said councillor and police board chair Lloyd Ferguson — and that could help police “focus enforcement where and when it’s needed.”

City council formally asked the province to allow photo radar on the Red Hill and Linc late last year after a consultant suggested a troubling spike in parkway collisions was due in part to chronic speeding. Toronto has made a similar request to use the contentious technology to save on policing costs. (Source: Hamilton Spectator)

Meanwhile, Hamilton Councillors voted to hike the cost of a monthly city parking lot pass by $10 this year, but put off any debate on meter rates until next year.

Temporary exemptions are also in the works for municipal lots in Dundas and on Concession Street, with the possibility of adding Ottawa Street and Kenilworth Avenue at a budget meeting Friday.

In theory, the rate bump should provide the city with an extra $238,000 in revenue — although senior director of bylaw and parking Marty Hazell noted the city will pay about $61,000 of that total for its own employees to park.

Downtown Coun. Jason Farr applauded the lot rate hike as a good first step, but added he’s still interested in a “robust discussion” on the city’s $1 meter rates.

“It’s the cheapest deal in Ontario,” he said. “I think we need to address that if we’re truly trying to encourage more people to get out of their cars and onto the bus.” (Source: Hamilton Spectator)

What is the Middle Class?

Canada’s finance minister insists low- and middle-income families will see two-thirds of the benefits from the government’s contentious multibillion-dollar tableau of family-friendly measures.

By that measure, Joe Oliver is suggesting families with annual incomes as high as $120,000 qualify as middle class.

The Finance Department’s own internal breakdown of the distribution of relief from the family package shows 68 per cent of the benefits — about two-thirds — will go to families that earn as much as $120,000 in 2015.

The Canadian Press obtained the figures under the Access to Information Act.

“Two-thirds of the benefits will go to low- and middle-income families,” Oliver said Monday while defending the government’s family package during Question Period in the House of Commons.

“I’m proud that our government has presented a plan, a benefit plan for four million Canadian families — every one of them.”

That family plan, including a controversial $2-billion-per-year income-splitting component, is expected to be a centrepiece of the Tories’ re-election campaign when Canadians head to the polls later this year.

It has also become a preferred bull’s-eye for their adversaries.

Political opponents have zeroed in on the income-splitting element, calling it an unfair policy that provides no relief for 85 per cent of all Canadian households and provides more benefits to wealthier families.

Looking at the family tax-and-benefit package as a whole, however, the subjective nature of the so-called “middle class” means who exactly stands to benefit — and who does not — remains an open question.

There is no universal definition of the middle class, a term frequently trotted out by politicians as a way to connect with a large group of voters. (Source: Toronto Star)

Canada passes US in middle-class wealth

According to a New York Times report, the rich in the US are getting richer, but the poor and middle classes are falling behind some of their Western peers.

“Middle-class incomes in Canada – substantially behind in 2000 – now appear to be higher than in the United States,” David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy write. “The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.”

The UK median income is still behind that of the US, but it’s catching up fast – a 19.7% increase since 2000. This is the same increase as Canada’s, whereas the US number was up by only 0.3%. (It’s worth noting that Germany’s middle class is also stagnating – at 1.4%.)

The Times reporters based their conclusions on a survey of household incomes in about 20 countries over the course of 35 years, taking into account inflation, differences in taxes, government benefits and cost of living in different locations.

“With a big share of recent income gains in this country flowing to a relatively small slice of high-earning households, most Americans are not keeping pace with their counterparts around the world,” they write.

The reporters point to three reasons why all but the wealthiest American may be falling behind:

First, educational attainment in the United States has risen far more slowly than in much of the industrialized world over the last three decades, making it harder for the American economy to maintain its share of highly skilled, well-paying jobs…

A second factor is that companies in the United States distribute a smaller share of the bounty to the middle class and poor than similar countries elsewhere…

Finally, governments in Canada and Western Europe take more aggressive steps to raise the take-home pay of low- and middle-income households by redistributing income.

The struggle for middle- and lower-class Americans is reflected in public opinion polls, the reporters write, which generally show greater dissatisfaction with their government than in other Western nations.

If the US middle class has it bad, the poor have it worse.

“The American poor now clearly trail the poor in several other rich countries,” Leonhardt and Quealy write. “At the 20th percentile – where someone is making less than four-fifths of the population – income in both the Netherlands and Canada was 15 percent higher than income in the United States in 2010.” (Source: BBC NEWS)